Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

fmk: you, lockrum, illegal lockrum

xhxhxhx answered:

no person is illegal, anon

[mitigatedchaos]

In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police. Can she survive the death of her creator, the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?

Google DeepMind Films presents…

Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die

Pineapple on Pizza Forever

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[dataandphilosophy]

“I don’t think there’s a young person, a woman, a Democrat, independent or a diverse voter that will stay home.” Stephanie Cutter, Democratic strategist, on the impact of a Republican decision to not nominate a supreme court justice, as quoted in the NYT.

Just one question comes to mind: how does a voter become diverse?

[loki-zen]

idk about you man but I am diverse as FUCK

[argumate]

American racial euphemisms are so frickin’ cringey

[mitigatedchaos]

White people, particularly white men, know that they will never be counted as “diverse”, further increasing their incentive not to support “diversity”.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

chroniclesofrettek asked:

re: The Unfreedom of Scarcity, this looks like the usual claim of people's actions are affected by incentives, and sometimes those incentives are ugly and not uniform across the population. Therefore, in order for people to be free from these ugly incentives, you need an all powerful central authority to enforce equality. This is Chomsky's anarchist position.

sadoeconomist answered:

I think it went even beyond that to suggest that consent was not meaningful in those circumstances. An attack on free civil society has to begin with attacking the validity of consent in some way - suggesting that voluntary institutions aren’t really voluntary for some reason. If some central institution of a free society can be declared coercive somehow, then of course coercion is justified in fighting back against it, and it’s a short hike from there to liquidating the kulaks.

I saw an Internet comment once that joked that every line of argument made by a radical feminist ultimately ends by trying to prove that women are incapable of consenting to sex. Anti-capitalists do the same thing, but they try to prove that workers are incapable of consenting to employment. And then oftentimes the same people will demand obedience to the state claiming that every citizen has freely consented to a wholly imaginary social contract!

You’ve just got to be relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought when you’re dealing with stuff like this. Do those ‘ugly non-uniform incentives’ invalidate anyone’s agency? That’s absolutely central to their argument, and yet…no, they just don’t. Imagine if you were in a court of law and someone was on trial for murder and they claimed it was self-defense because the victim offered them a trade they found very difficult to turn down and thus they were being coerced. That’s the core of what the whole case turns on. Everything else they have to say is dependent on that twisted logic. They proceed past it as swiftly as they can and try to cover it with emotional appeals but that’s the cornerstone supporting their entire ideology, and it’s nonsensical.

[bambamramfan]

The first paragraph is entirely correct, except for the “then of course coercion is justified in…”. If you see the world solely as “state coercion is never justified, unless it is always justified” that follows, but it’s dumb. State action should be based on the likely, short term effects. This strongly discourages murder, because the short term effects of murder are very bad (people are dead.) All while aiming for a world where no coercion or state is necessary or even wanted.

The second paragraph is largely correct. Ideology is contradiction, and the best way to fight it is by pointing these contradictions out.

For being “ relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought” you’re jumping to “what would be the unpleasant effects of this if it were true” a lot more than “is it true” (at least in the above paragraphs and your previous posts.)

“Agency” is a philosophical construct. We can not measure whether agency actually exists, except for your various intuition-loaded thought experiments. There’s no object to point out and say “now there is agency” or “now you have doubled your agency.” However, the benefits of a free society we can measure. Do people politically disagree with one another? Is rape common or are people having sex with the partners they choose in a free society? Do people offer criticism of people more powerful than them?

Highly unequal fields, even with formal rights and protections, just do not look like free societies. In the actions people take, they look like feudal structures.

If you value intellectual diversity, and disvalue grudingly accepted sex, and want “lots of individuals bopping around doing their thing” that you probably should be more concerned with what reduces inequality, than on shoring up formal rules.

On a separate note, I do find it extremely funny how much you dislike my post (which was dedicated to pointing out a problem) because obviously the post means we should have a strong state, whereas the only other criticism was people disliking it because obviously the post means we should abolish government and then we will be helpless before the whims of social power.

[sadoeconomist]

It was @wirehead-wannabe‘s response that explicitly brought up the question of libertarianism being at fault and that was what I was responding to. I don’t dislike the post overall, I think it brings up an interesting problem and discussion, I was just trying to vigorously assert that the problem would be minimized by adopting libertarian policies in my other comment, and I was trying to make a more general point above.

The thing that you’re doing that I feel the need to argue against is when you imply things that are actually voluntary are really coerced and then you go on to imply that we should violate the norms of civil society to correct the problem because they’ve been rendered moot anyway. You’ve done it again there - highly unequal fields don’t ‘look like free societies’ to you. And yet they were stipulated as such! And then you go on to say we should prioritize reducing inequality over ‘shoring up formal rules’ - you’re being incredibly vague here but you explicitly named ‘free speech, consent, and private property’ - pretty much exactly what libertarians stand for - in the original post. So you’re arguing for violating what I’d consider fundamental human rights in order to make people more equal to solve a problem that doesn’t justify that kind of response. There is only one institution with the monopoly on legitimized use of force needed to attempt such a thing. And you want to do it through the notoriously flawed lens of class conflict analysis. I’m sure we can do without another lecture on why that’s a bad idea.

Let’s bring it down to the level of a concrete example. You brought up acting in the original post. Okay, so there’s an aspiring actress - one of many - and a famous and talented director - a much rarer commodity - and she feels like she needs to flatter him and give him sexual favors in order to make sure she gets her big break in his next movie or else she’ll languish in obscurity forever. That’s a good central example of the kind of thing you’re talking about, correct?

When she offers those sexual favors, is she being raped? I think that’s what you’re trying really hard to imply but I think the answer is ‘absolutely not.’ I think she’s perhaps in an unpleasant situation that she chose to put herself into of her own free will and we have an obligation to respect her choice. She is still free. You asked what consent means in that situation? It means everything.

And furthermore, what would you do to change the situation? Your original post ends with: ‘Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.’ How specifically is class power analysis going to fix the Hollywood dating scene? I honestly have no idea what the answer to that question could be. No offense, but I will be extremely surprised if you can come up with anything workable that doesn’t make the situation worse.

[mitigatedchaos]

He(?) could be advocating increased social awareness among those higher in the chain, in which, like with employer/employee it is socially considered questionable for those in that position to accept these offers. Honestly, I think the bigger issue is survival, not fame.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[nuclearspaceheater]

People saying Trump’s plan to deport millions are “unprecedented”, like Operation Wetback wasn’t a thing.

“Unprecedented” does not mean extreme, or bad. If Trump announced an intention to bring back slavery, that would be pretty extreme, and pretty bad, but it’d be the exact opposite of unprecedented.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.

[argumate]

wut

[mitigatedchaos]

A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.

…wait, what?

[argumate]

a twisted version of Gift of the Magi: the woman who mistakenly thinks her husband is a cuck due to a miscommunication earlier in their relationship and sadly goes along with it to please him; he doesn’t get anything out of it at all but it’s gone on so long he can’t find a way to admit the truth.

[mitigatedchaos]

A second-order cuck who enjoys the marital infidelity of others but would never touch a woman himself, running for office only to find out that existing social changes already in motion made his plans irrelevant.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

Problems in privacy engineering that seem unsolvable:

• - sending information to another party that lets them observe and interact with it, but not store it indefinitely (or only lets them store it imperfectly)*
• - sending information to another party that lets them save it and interact with it however they want, but not share it with a third party*
• - verifying that one is not currently being observed (maybe use short-range EMPs to solve this in the case of checking a room for bugs?)*
• - being able to store and retrieve information from a device in a quickly and easily human-readabe format that no one else can understand
• - being able to e.g. enter passwords without anyone observing or understanding the step between thinking of the password in your mind and the device receiving the password*
• - encryption that can be broken only with a warrant somehow
• - being able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved and used publicly, but not without the owner learned why and how you used it (this one may be very bad for people interested in reducing the power of IP laws)

Pretty sure many of these are actually theoretically impossible unless you can restrict the amount of surveillance or computational power that potential observers have access to.

The ones marked with a * are things that, as far as I can tell, intuitive social interaction and subjective feelings of security and privacy depend on. If they end up being major problems and sources of risk, I predict widespread mental health problems.

[mitigatedchaos]

Neural interface, brah. Helps with some of them.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

Concept: cuckinky men pressuring their wives to sleep with other men, wives going to spend the night with gal pals watching Buffy and drinking margaritas, returning home in the morning to tell stories of wild night with Paulo.

[argumate]

wut

[mitigatedchaos]

A woman crying alone because her cuck husband wants her to sleep with other men instead of the man she loves the most, his fetish seeming to her to be the deepest expression of insecurity and self-hatred.

…wait, what?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@txwatson

But there’s a real, and significant, segment of his supporters who voted for him because of, not in spite of, the racism, misogyny, and fascist policy.

Do you know the logic behind the US government releasing Tor to the public?  It’s along the lines of the following - if the only people that use Tor are American spies, than any US agent found using onion routing software will be outed.  If many people use Tor for a variety of activities, then the presence of onion routing software could mean anything from ordinary local black market dealings to just being paranoid.

The signal is hidden in the noise.

Well, congratulations, because that can also happen unintentionally as a Tragedy of the Commons with words such as “racism” and “misogyny”.  People were told to be careful with overusing the terms, but haha, like that was going to happen.  Besides, the people questioning the use of such terms were the Oppressors, right?  They should be mocked for “freeze peach”, right?

Now the overuse of antibiotics has created a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Oops.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

(1/2) A little while ago, you said: "I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign ...". You were probably much more in tune with the campaign than I was, but this really isn't what I remember. I recall hearing a lot of "Trump is crazy and so are his policies; it's obvious and he can never win."

theunitofcaring answered:

(2/2) There’s the Michael Moore speech, but I’m not sure what (if anything) he was advocating there. There was also Obama’s thing, but that was at a Clinton rally with Clinton supporters, not an outreach event. Can you point to some examples of Clinton supporters trying to convey understanding to Trump supporters?

I’m thinking mostly of the deluge of articles like these:

Listening to Trump voters

This is who votes for Donald Trump

What a liberal sociologist learned from spending five years in Trump’s America

Who are Donald Trump’s supporters and what do they want?

Understanding the undecided voters

I feel like this was much much more of a genre in the media I was consuming this election compared to any previous election. Of course, maybe all of these attempts at credible empathy were just really bad, because they failed to capture what Trump voters actually cared about or just seeded their characterization with enough “but of course Trump’s still terrible” that it couldn’t resonate with the people it was supposed to describe, but I definitely saw a lot of ‘let’s understand Trump supporters!’

[mitigatedchaos]

The Trump supporters don’t trust the Left/Globalists.  Globalist types held power, and future Trump supporters’ jobs got outsourced, and it wasn’t as easy as economists abstractly imagine it as to get new jobs that paid enough.

In order to get through to them, those against Trump would have had to sacrifice something big and expensive to signal that yes, they really do care, and aren’t just going to throw the Trump supporter-types under the bus the moment they get power, in favor of Multiculturalism, Diversity™ and Globalism.  Hilary Clinton could not credibly send that signal.

Bernie might have, perhaps, but it wasn’t his “turn.”

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

A Calexit would cost the country an enormous amount of money, it’s true, and weaken Trump as well.

But if you’re worried about the most powerful country in the world being too right-wing, removing a large portion of the left-wing population from the voter base seems like the exact opposite of what you should want to do.